I vomited out the words. “Yes, ma’am.”
Holy fuck, this bitch deserved to die. Why didn’t I just fucking kill her already? My hands were free, after all, though broken, and surely I could summon enough strength to hurl her off the bed and onto the concrete floor using only my body weight, use my one functioning leg to smash that smirk on herface and pound it into a bloody death grin, leave her bleeding out onto the pile of chains where she belonged.
But oh, she’d fucking love that. Because it would mean she’d turned me intoher. And then Noam would arrive, and see to it that my body was soon lying broken and twisted on top of hers, just one more rotting corpse in the charnel house.
Yeah, I was already turning into her, and I was going to die anyway. But if my only choice left was how I would go, it sure wouldn’t be like that.
So my mind reached out into the dark, groping toward memories untainted, for places I had been thatweren’ttorture chambers. Goddammit, there’d been so few. And they weren’t places. They were people. Louisa. Maeve. My mother.
That was it. And I couldn’t bear to bring any of them here.
Blocking out my eyes from the starved shape her lips made and my ears from the series of moans escaping her mouth as she whetted her nails on my chest, gouging my skin past the scarred white, into the red, where it hurt, it fuckinghurt, and all I could do in that moment was bite back my moan and pull a thin, dark veil of nothing clumsily over my mind as I shuddered and spasmed into her—hating every fucking second of it.
A few seconds later,shefinished with a cry like a strangled songbird, collapsing onto my chest, heart pounding as if our arteries had been cut and spliced. She inhaled deeply as if she could sense more tears forming even now behind my squeezed-shut eyelids.
Yes, but no. No more for her tonight. Please. She’d taken enough.
She left a sticky slick of moisture between us as her weight shifted and she propped herself up on her elbows and pulled away from our locked hips. For a few seconds, she just lay there with her cheek propped on her hand, staring at me in my horror, like an infatuated teenager on a lacy pink pillow.
And I lay still, afraid to move. Unable to move.
“Starling.” Her tongue purred around the made-up “name” she’d decided was mine. “So bright. So lofty. So pure, while you’re lying there in chains. Thing is, you still”—she giggled—“youstillthink you’re made for something better than this. For something purer. Forher. And I just—I can’t help but think—shouldn’t someone have beaten that out of you long ago? Oh, God, you poor, sweet, vain,delusionallittle slave boy. What are we going to do with you?” She jabbed a manicured nail toward the area between my legs where she had just been, eyes like blue-hot blazes in the greasy yellow light. “I suppose it doesn’t matter because I know better.Youknow better. You aren’t above me. Youareme. After all,” she said as she rolled off me, her long finger delicately trailing a streak of blood- and pus-tinged tears down my cheek, thieving another kiss. “You chose this.”
I wept for Louisa, but it was Resi who had lapped up my tears. How fucking unfair was that?
At last, she pulled away, a single arm still draped across my chest like yet another shackle. She nestled into the curve of my body, and there we lay, mistress and slave, a lovers’ travesty, two bloody angels on a metal slab.
What had I done? What was there to donow?
Well, die, probably. It was what I deserved.
But instead, as Resi’s breathing slowly but surely evened out, I began to look around. The lamp sat on the floor near the bed, near the pile of chains, just out of reach of my hands. But I didn’t need my hands. Once more, I glanced at Resi, her hair spilling over the bed like hay, each rise and fall of her chest beating away the time. I let out a slow exhale. Otherwise, the room was silent, the air hung thick with the musk of a place where everything was a waste: Spent tailings. Spilled seed. Crushed bones. Shattered lives.
Resi’s arm draped over me, heavy for a woman so light. Her fingers twitched in her sleep, which was as restless as one might expect given the living spectral horror she was.
The opioids would wear off soon. I could already feel my full capacity for reason coming back, flowing through me, and I welcomed it back like an old friend. My pain, however, was an old enemy. But I couldn’t stop because I’d led Resi to this slab—enduredthat—for a reason. I screamed at myself, wishing I had a prod to electrocute myself into moving.
Get up, you pathetic, weak bastard. You can die after you killher.
I stirred a finger, then an arm, pawing weakly to get the bottlecap—the same one I’d found in the sand earlier that day—loose from where I’d awkwardly palmed it under my bandages while Resi had been gazing up at the stars. Using the last two fingers of my right hand—the only ones even half-functional, I’d discovered after a methodical test of all of them—I scraped the jagged edge against the cinderblock wall a few times, then managed to push it against the rusty valve of the canister of acetylene gas that had been propped behind the pile of chains. The cap levered the valve open just enough to leak the gas—and maybe, if I was lucky, undo the lock on my collar, or the other end of the chain. But that would be the hard part.
All in all, there were two outcomes. One was that it would slowly infuse the chamber, killing Resi and hopefully Noam, too, whenever he came to check on her. But only if my theory was correct and they couldn’t smell it under the acrid, coppery aroma that infused the mine. In the meantime, it would give me a sliver of time to get myself free somehow. Or, if Icouldn’tget myself free—far likelier—it would kill me, too. Just like every other plan I’d enacted recently.
Anyway, staying alive wasn’t the point. The point was making sure Louisa couldn’t get here, or at least ensuring there would be no one here to greet her when she did.
The gas set, and I edged gingerly back over to the bed. But the rusty springs I lay on creaked like a gunshot in a tomb, and Resi’s eyelashes fluttered. I went rigid, stilling my breath, and her hand retreated.
I had only seconds. Heart pounding, I used my good leg to kick the chains over the canister, then camouflage them with the dirt and debris littering the floor. Ripping a few strips of filthy fabric off the bedding with my teeth, I settled myself back down on the cot, clumsily wrapping myself in as many layers as I could to filter the air for as long as I could while I worked on my collar and chain.
Preparing to die. It seemed like I’d been doing that a lot lately.
Ah, who was I kidding? I’d been fucked since the day I was born.
Case in point, before I could position myself to start looking for tools to work on the chain, the door swung open, followed by Resi’s eyes. Alighting on the new arrival, she practically pushed me, naked, off the bed.
“Mistress—I mean boss,” Obadiah stammered, eyes darting from one nude form to the other.
Fuck. This must feel like Christmas morning for the old perv.
